Below is the Out-GridView of one of the powershell script which pulls Backup information of SQL Server databases.

This interactive table gives you an option to Add a criteria,and using that criteria you can filter the results.

Example – We are adding the criteria ‘Database Name’ and entering starting characters of Adventure works will filter out the data for you.

This interactive table will be really useful when you are dealing with a lot of data and you need to filer out the same.Exporting the data to a spreadsheet is one option,however for quick slice and dice Out-GridView is the cmdlet for you.

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With the release of SQL Server 2012,we have a chance to review our existing HA + DR solution and there is always an option to test and understand how this can be replaced/enhanced in SQL 2012.

Lets look at the below example (This is just one example,we have multiple HA,DR solutions) of one of the famous and most used HA + DR situation before the release of 2012 –

Database mirroring has been really flexible and this feature has been used as a HA solution for the primary data center.In the event of a failure the mirrored database will be live and users will be connected to it.The primary data center involves a witness server too,which will facilitate automatic failover.

The DR site has been configured with a lop shipping secondary and in the event of primary DC failure,this database will be used for connections.This cannot be automated and there is always a manual intervention.

There is potentially no data loss for database mirroring situation within the primary DC,however log shipping involves data loss.

After SQL Server 2012

We have DBM still in 2012,however this feature is deprecated.This simply means that future versions of SQL Server wont come with DBM facility and we need to use Always ON Availability Groups instead.

With 2012 we will be creating Windows Server Failover cluster between primary site and DR site and we will add all the nodes to this cluster.The next part will be creating availability groups for the required set of databases.In the above example we will have synchronous data transfer for the secondary replica within the primary DC.We can have either syn or async transfer for the secondary replica at the DR site.

The beauty of this solution is we can have readable secondaries.We can have up to 4 secondaries.

With Availability Groups we have the flexibility of grouping databases which needs to be failed over during an event.We can have automatic failover using fileshare witness.

Have you tried setting up Availability Groups within your environments? I am curious to hear from you.

TechEd India 2012 gave me a fabulous ride this time.Even though I couldn’t attend the event in person,I was able to utilize the LIVE streaming options and had a gala time watching key notes,sessions and extravaganza demos right from the comfort of my home with a hot coffee in my hand.

I realized the fact that if I am getting this much fun while watching the LIVE stream,then how much fun it would have been to attend the event directly from Bangalore(TechEd India 2012 was held at Bangalore,India).

Twitter was flooded with live tweets from the event location and #TechEdIn tag was used.I had a great time tweeting LIVE all 3 days.

Day 1 started with a bang when Sanket Akerkar (Managing Director, Microsoft India) gave the opening key note.He gave a clear picture on where Microsoft is heading to and what can be expected in the coming days.

I got a chance to watch three live streaming sessions on Day 3 of TechEd,and they were really exciting.

Vinod’s session was very much interesting and the session evolved around on 3 main focus areas,ie Storage alignment and the behavior in SQL 2012,Security changes,Checkpoint changes and Memory changes.

The session explained how FSUTIL output needs to be read.When security topic came into picture,there were some very tricky questions asked.Couple of them which I remember is

Q – “How many sysadmins will be there by default on a SQL Server 2008 R2 Instance?”

Ans – I was pretty sure about SA already being sysadmin,NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM will also be there.I also found that the service account that is used to start the SQL Server service and SQL Server Agent service are individually granted sysadmin rights in SQL Server.

Q – “How many new permissions are added to SQL 2012”

Ans – I had no clue on this and he confirmed that its 19.

The session also covered about DB recovery changes,VLF issues/enhancements,Checkpoints and some good take away related to Memory.

Overall an excellent session and it inspired me to read through Disk Alignment Best Practices doc to understand more about the concepts.I will be reaching out Vinod to clarify couple of my doubts and if I get more info,I will share that amoung every one here.

Pinal’s session was one of the very exciting and enjoyable sessions of TechEd 2012.He mixed fun from beginning till end of the session and was definitely a crowd pulling effort.

He started with a bang asking a ‘Who is he?’ question.No one had clue on what is happening and finally he came up with the answer himself.He was talking about Gene Myron Amdahl.He formulated Amdahl’s law, which states a fundamental limitation of parallel computing.

He gave multiple examples to explain the concept and he ensured that everyone understand the concept like MDOP value and Cost threshold for parallelism.

There were so many demos explaining if parallelism is good or bad.He also focused that the decision to go for parallelism for OLAP,OLTP or hybrid needs to be taken after careful analysis.

Overall I enjoyed the session a lot and expecting more interesting tips from Pinal on parallelism.

In Amit’s session you can assure one thing. You will learn at least a new concept and can walk back happily to home. This happened with me yet again and I learned couple of new things after his session.

The session was excellent and it went with great flow. All kinds of backups were discussed which included File Group level, File level etc.He explained what is a piecemeal restore.

There was focus on Volume Shadow Copy Service and he clearly explained the behind the scene concepts.The discussion also touched VDI.

He explained about the Data Transfer Options like BufferCountSize and Maxtransfersize and showed great set of demos on the same.

In a nut shell all the 3 sessions which I attended was fun and there was definite takeaway’s from my perspective.

I missed to attend another 3 important sessions.One of them was not streaming and the remaining 2 had conflicts with other sessions.I will watch the on demand video for these 3 sessions and will update this post.The sessions are –

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With SQL Server 2012 RTM GA on April 2012 some of you might have already started planning to migrate your database environments to 2012.

Migrating to SQL Server 2012 is a great idea from various angles and a right budget will ease your efforts too(Keeping in mind the increase in licensing costs for 2012)

Migration is one of key activities which will be triggered soon after any product launch,and one of the key information which you should be aware as a DBA or as a decision maker is to understand when the mainstream support is going to be over for the existing versions of SQL Server.

You should know the dates,and the most important part of knowing this information is that it will enable you to take the right decisions.

When is the mainstream support for SQL Server 2005 SP4 is going to be over? What is extend support phase?

You can get all these information right under your finger tips by reading the below post from CSS Engineers post

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March 7th 2012 ! This was the day when SQL Server 2012 was launched virtually to everyone.I was looking forward for this event with great expectations.Even though we had a initial delay for the launch,everything was in place very soon and the platform http://www.sqlserverlaunch.com was open to everyone who had registered.

Wow!!! That was the first word which came out of my mouth as soon as I opened the site.The site was truly amazing and it was the right platform to launch a product like SQL Server.

The major sections of the portal was

1. Watch Key Note

2. Sessions by Track

3.Visit Expo Hall

4. Networking Lounge

What key notes were all about

There were 2 keynotes which were quite impressive.The first one was from Ted Kummert(Corp Vice President,Business Platform Div MSFT) and second was from Quentin Clark (Corp Vice President,Database Sys Grp MSFT)

Ted Kummert officially confirmed that the Evaluation version of SQL 2012 will be available from March 7th 2012 and the General Availability of SQL 2012 RTM will be from April 1st 2012.

MSDN subscribers will get the RTM bit before the GA.

Both the keynotes were focusing on Microsoft’s road map for the future and what SQL Server 2012 is bringing to the table.

What sessions were all about

The sessions were divided mainly into 3 tracks,the tracks clearly shows what SQL Server brings to the table.The tracks are

Mission Critical Confidence

Break Through Insights

Cloud On your terms

There are over 30 sessions with some exciting demos,and they are a must watch.

My top sessions are –

1.Fast Time to Solution: Introduction to SQL Azure and Cloud Database Solutions by Greg Leake

Expo halls were the really cool part of the launch.You have the opportunity to browse through various technology giants workshops and they will have videos showcasing their capabilities around SQL 2012,cloud,infrastructre etc.

There is also a Microsoft pavilion and a PASS pavilion which I found pretty interesting.

What Networking Lounge is all about

Yet again great opportunity for technology lovers to discuss on various topics virtually.There are topic pods which you can join and start involve on any discussions.This was pretty neat.

The sqlserverlaunch site has some other interesting stuff around.There is a point system which will help you to earn points and achieve levels and virtual badges.You will also get badges after visiting a expo hall for a particular company.

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Extended events are one of most powerful feature which was exposed from SQL server 2008(On wards).Till SQL 2012 most of your actions involving extended events used to be through TSQL codes.I strongly believe that TSQL is really powerful and still the best way to work with extended events.

Starting SQL 2012 administrators have the option to create/manage and work with extended events via GUI too.

This is pretty neat and lets do a demo to create an event using GUI start watching the live data –

1. We will proceed to create an extended event session using GUI.For the purpose of this demo we will choose the event ‘blocked_process_report’ and will name the session as ‘Event_Blocking’

If you right click the session,you will get a wizard which will guide you through the process very clearly.

2. Once you select the event.You have an option to configure the same to add additional info like database_id,session_id etc.